Process-oriented or process-centric programs have evolved to enable processing of complex instructions modeling real-world interactions between autonomous agents. Existing systems attempt to map business problems to high-level workflows by modeling the business problem. However, real world workflows vary in a variety of dimensions such as (a) execution and modeling complexity, (b) knowledge of the structure of the flow at design time, (c) statically defined or ad-hoc/dynamic, (d) ease of authoring and editing the flow at various points in its lifecycle, and (e) weak or strong association of business logic with the core workflow process. Existing models fail to accommodate all these factors.
Further, most existing workflow models are based on either language-based approaches (e.g., BPEL4WS, XLANG/S, and WSFL) or application based approaches. Language based approaches are high-level workflow languages with a closed set of pre-defined constructs which help model the workflow process to the user/programmer. The workflow languages carry all of the semantic information for the closed set of constructs to enable the user to build a workflow model. However, the languages are not extensible by the developers and represent a closed set of primitives that constitute the workflow model. The languages are tied to the language compiler shipped by the workflow system vendor. Only the workflow system product vendor may extend the model by extending the language with a new set of constructs in a future version of the product. This often requires upgrading the compiler associated with the language. In addition, the languages usually do not declaratively expose or define functions or operations that can be readily and efficiently used by other programs.
Application based approaches are applications which have the workflow capabilities within the application to solve a domain specific problem. These applications are not truly extensible nor do they have a programmable model.
In addition, with the existing approaches, the issues of complexity, foreknowledge, dynamic workflows, authoring ease, and strength of associations with business logic and core workflows are not adequately addressed. There are no extensible, customizable, and re-hostable workflow designer frameworks, available to build visual workflow designers to model different classes of workflows. Existing systems lack a rapid application development (RAD) style workflow design experience which allows users to graphically design the workflow process and associate the business logic in a programming language of developer's choice.
Also, workflow processes deal with cross cutting orthogonal and tangled concerns that span multiple steps of a workflow process model. For example, while parts of the workflow process are designed to participate in long running transactions, other parts of the same process are designed for concurrent execution or for accessing a shared resource. Due to design shortcomings, existing systems fail to provide interleaving of execution threads which enable users to design synchronous or interleaved execution of activities. Still other portions of the same workflow process require tracking, while other portions handle business or application level exceptions. There is a need to apply certain behaviors to one or more portions of a workflow process.
Some workflow modeling approaches are impractical as they require a complete flow-based description of an entire business process including all exceptions and human interventions. Some of these approaches provide additional functionality as exceptions arise, while other approaches exclusively employ a constraint-based approach instead of a flow-based approach to modeling a business process. Existing systems implement either the flow-based or constraint-based approach. Such systems are too inflexible to model many common business situations. These systems also lack the capability to asynchronously handle exceptions or cancellations.